True Grit **Spoilers**

True Grit is a Western that invites a confrontation with some of the heaviest themes going: love and loss, friendship, vengeance, justice, the passage of time… the whole shooting match. But while the movie is almost always entertaining and frequently hilarious, it is also one of those films that becomes increasingly less satisfying as it marinates in your working memory. Coming out of the theatre last week I was convinced it was brilliant; now, I’m sure that it is an almost complete failure.

The story, in brief:  Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, and he’s basically doing The Dude Wearing a Hat. Matt Damon plays the Texas Ranger, Mr. Labeouf, and he seems to have decided to play his character by doing his Matthew McConaughey impression. Together, they help a precocious and stubborn 14 year old girl track down the man who killed her father.  This is a great setup, opening up any number of sidetracks and detours for exploration, but the Coens play it as flat and straight as the dusty prairie.

Is Rooster Cogburn a lawman, or just a hired killer? Is the girl a grieving daughter, or an emotionally crippled cipher? Is it a film about the evolving friendship between a cynical old man and an innocent young girl, sort of like The Road set in the 1870s? Is it about the emotional transference of a girl looking for a father figure, as in The Professional?  There’s three of them, why not make it a Freudian fable of the id (Cogburn) the ego (the girl) and the superego (Matt Damon’s Ranger, Mr. Laboeuf)?  

Any of this was available, and the Coens decline every option. Even the most obvious tension – the young girl being on the cusp of womanhood and all the problems that might lead to – is almost completely ignored.

The ongoing problem with Coen brothers movies is that they have absolutely no interest in character development. Their films are essentially cartoons, where every character arrives fully formed, with no concern for motivation. This isn’t a huge problem in the three existential works – Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski – because in those cases, the structure is what defines the contours of each film’s internal morality.

In True Grit, this is a problem. How did Mattie Ross get so wise and cynical at age 14? Why is Rooster Cogburn so lonely? What is driving Labeouf to the ends of the earth in search of Chaney? Why did Tom Chaney kill Mattie Ross’s father? Does he even deserve to die for what happened?

The Coens are simply not interested in these sorts of questions. In a film where a fourteen year old girl hunts down and ultimately shoots her father’s murderer, this comes across as a form of moral blindness, or – worse -- indifference.